During my time playing WoW I became progressively more involved with the game. At first I played for maybe a few hours per week then my time commitment started to rise as I became a member of a guild, then a raiding guild. I maintained a social life during this time, thankfully I was friends with a lot of non-gamers, and as friends do they’d ask me what was going on in my life. The first answers that came to mind were about WoW events I had participated in, gear I had acquired, anecdotes in guild chat, and other game related trivia. I decided that trying to explain these things to them such that they would have an understanding or even appreciation would be time consuming and largely embarrassing. Eventually my life got to the point where I had nothing to share when asked the question. I realized there was a problem¹.

Like most players on PvP realms who’ve been griefed, I had moments of severe frustration where I contemplated leaving the game entirely. This reaction is fairly normal but passes quickly once you take a break from the game for an hour or even a day. The process of leveling up a character on a PvP realm is definitely trying, add into the mix being a member of a strongly disliked alliance guild and the griefing was increased quite a bit. All of this was rumbling around in the back of my head when I started understanding the importance of my /played number. At a month on my main character I was in the lower half of my guild and while none of them were holding any records it did strike a chord with me. Like any proper geek I started doing some math.

I figure the average college student ideally spends three hours in the class room, per class, per week. Factor in a 15 week semester and we get 45 hours per class, multiply by a 5 class load and we get 225 hours of classroom time per semester. Considering only my main character I had 30+ days played, which is 720+ hours spent in the game. So, using our previous estimates 720 comes in at over three semesters of college classroom time. I’m estimating that I had probably a total of 60 days across all characters on my account, so if we factor in variable study time we’re looking at around 5 semesters. That’s enough time for an associate’s degree!

So I started thinking what I could have done with all that time: I could have become mostly fluent in a foreign language, been in terrific shape, attained any number of computer related certifications, become proficient in a programming language (unless its assembly which is, in my research, unlearnable) or gotten exceedingly intimate with any number of kernels. To be blunt, my realization really bummed me out. In the interest of fairness in lieu of Warcraft I could have taken up innumerable other expensive or dangerous hobbies. I could have been killing my liver, ruining ear drums, death during skydiving, that meth thing I’ve been hearing so much about, or wrestling gorillas

The expansion introduced a new player cap on level 60+ instances of 25. Guilds who had 40-50 active raid players began to have trouble keeping two consistant teams of 25 players. The value of each player to the raid increased dramatically, pre-expansion raids were possible with a few players missing, but given the smaller caps the difference became insurmountable. Suddenly it became harder for guilds to carry unskilled players in raids and completing the new content, even with excellent gear, was harder than most people expected. Like many guilds ours had to become very selective on who was allowed into raids if completing new content was the goal. Naturally there became an “A team” and a “B team” and with any hierarchy this lead to severe problems. Some guilds began to recruit more aggressively to attempt a consistant roster for two 25 person teams and shed players considered dead weight. Some guilds with a relaxed attitude about required participation had to reverse their positions to serve the needs of the majority. There wasn’t a whole lot of thought on how to empirically establish the skill of players in raids where they were called on to perform hybrid duties and a lot of squabbling started to occur. I came to the realization that I had the talents for a hybrid class and wasn’t geared well enough not to perform my primary healing role. The only alternative was world and battleground PvP which offered only the prospect of more repetition and competing with players who focused all their time on that aspect of the game. I decided it was time to quit.

During my periods of frustration with the game I had given a lot of thought to how I would quit. I generally liked most of the people in my guild and I was one of the few priests with raiding experience, so I decided to donate the contents of my bank. I talked with a few people I had become very friendly with so they could have preference on whatever items they wanted and my gold, then I posted a thread on the guild forums explaining I was quitting and posting an inventory. I allowed five days for people to call dibs on items, and then I put what remained on the auction house on a Friday evening so the weekend players would have a chance to buy. After my auctions came in Sunday night, I divvied up my gold, disenchanted my gear and sent out those materials, found one of my favorite grinding spots in the barrens and logged out.

There is a lot of dumb drama surrounding players quitting altogether or leaving guilds and that was something I wanted to avoid. I have heard some hilariously lame excuses such as “my cat has cancer,” or “this is interfering in my walk with Jesus.” Seriously, WoW is much more important than any God. Plus did you know that Jesus played WoW? There’s a whole book of the bible about how he rezzed himself. Considering that he was dead longer than the 30 minute soul stone duration he must have used the goblin jumper cables, besides accepting a rez from a warlock has to be a deal with the devil.

The first reason to stay quit was fairly obvious to me. Giving up a game because it had too much impact on your life and realizing you had trouble controlling that impact, only then to come back to the game, struck me as exceedingly pathetic. The second reason was simple, I wanted to get ahead in life and I knew the game was making that much harder for me to do.

During the first week away from the game I noticed that my mood had become pretty sour and I was just not feeling like myself. I realized that the game began to fulfill needs beyond an occasional leisure activity. In the first week I hadn’t stopped having down time, I’d come home and watch TV, maybe play Xbox for a while, read, go out with friends, hit the gym, etc. So I started thinking about all the fun I had playing WoW and then I asked myself, “What were you doing in the game when you were having fun?”

I came back with three things, while not all specific actions, they were related to me having a good time. Repetition, learning about the game (depth of detail), and completing encounters where I might have gotten a useful item (chance). With a better understanding of why the game was so impactful for me I was better equipped to resist the temptation to go back.

¹Many who are very involved with MMORPGs or other role playing games would advise someone in my situation here that maybe it was time to find new friends. Perhaps with people who used the words “norm”, “mundane”, or “sheeple” as earnest pejoratives. Personally, I choose not to live my life so involved with games and fantasy that I need to make significant adjustments to my social life to accommodate that. There are those that do and it is their choice to make. I used my beginning deviation from what I considered the norm to alert me that I was making a choice I may not have been comfortable with.

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